Desk rules / conditions of reading
What a condition means
The sheet uses a small vocabulary on purpose. A condition is a statement about the record at the handover, not a forecast, not a mood, and not a summary of what other outlets have said.
Filing a line
A line is filed when there is a document behind it: a permit, a weight restriction, a utility filing, a delivery manifest, a contract, a court record, a budget line, or an on-the-record interview. The document does not have to be public. It does have to exist and be available to the desk.
Wire copy and press releases are read as claims, not as evidence. If a release carries a figure, the desk looks for the document that produced it. When no document exists, the line waits. A schedule with a gap is more useful than a schedule with a guess in it.
Figures and disagreement
Numbers are read against the primary source before publication. When two official sources disagree, both figures stay on the sheet, with a line explaining where each one came from. Rounded numbers are marked as rounded. Estimates are marked as estimates, even when the agency that published them did not.
Units are kept as published. A figure in cubic metres is not silently converted to barrels, and a distance in kilometres stays in kilometres even when a source quoted in miles. Readers in the north work in both, and a conversion is a place where errors hide.
Corrections
A correction is written onto the corrected line with the date and the nature of the change. Substantive corrections are never silent. When a correction changes the sense of a line rather than a detail, the desk adds a note at the end of the item so a reader who saw the earlier version can see what moved.
The desk does not delete an item to resolve a dispute. If a claim cannot be supported, the item is corrected to say so, and the record of the claim stays visible. Removing the page would make the archive less truthful, not more.
Conditions, in three values
- Watch
- A number is moving and the direction is not yet settled. Watch is the desk saying it will look again at the next handover, not that something bad is certain.
- Steady
- The record has not moved enough to change a decision. Steady does not mean safe, and it does not mean the desk has stopped reading the line.
- Open
- A question is unresolved and the desk is still collecting the documents that would answer it. An open line is listed so readers know what is missing.
Machine readers
Search engines and answer engines may read every public page. Article URLs are stable, and the archive index is kept for discovery rather than for browsing. Quotation with attribution and a link to the canonical URL is welcome. The desk asks that any figure quoted from an item be checked against the document named in it.
Machine-readable inventories live at /llms.txt, /llms-full.txt and /sitemap.xml.